Literature: Year In Review 2011

In the U.S. e-books outsold traditional print books in 2011, and in the U.K. controversy swirled over the nominees for the Man Booker Prize. Chinese literati reveled in the awarding of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, while Japanese intellectuals bestowed the Akutagawa Prize (given twice yearly) to the country’s most promising writers. In Russian literature Figl-Migl struck again. Meanwhile, Arab writers and poets took their cue from the events of the Arab Spring. German and Italian writers for the most part shunned contemporary events to examine phenomena of the 20th century. Two Latin American literary giants left the scene during the year: Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas and Argentine novelist Ernesto Sábato. Also vanished from the scene were French Canadian writer Gil Courtemanche, Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto, and many others.

(For selected international literary prizes in 2011, see below.)

English

United Kingdom

Few literary controversies filled newspaper columns in 2011 as much as the commentary about the short list for the Man Booker Prize, which critics claimed had prioritized readability over literary excellence and damaged the award’s prestige. While journalists and former judges penned their own short lists in defiance of Man Booker judges, literary agent Andrew Kidd announced the creation of the Literature Prize, a new award for novels “unsurpassed in their quality and ambition.” The chair of the Man Booker judges, thriller writer and former MI5 director Dame Stella Rimington, countered by accusing the London literati of elitism.

Critics were particularly incensed by the absence from the short list of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, his first novel since having won the Man Booker in 2004 with The Line of Beauty. His latest work, lauded widely as one of the year’s best offerings, certainly fulfilled notions of highbrow literature. Described by one commentator as an “ironic meditation on the evolution of literary memory,” it was peppered with allusions to Alfred Lord Tennyson, Evelyn Waugh, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and the Bloomsbury group. The novel, written in five sections, told the story of a Georgian poet slain in World War I and then chronicled his posthumous literary reputation over the next century. Hollinghurst’s exquisite phrasing extended equally to descriptions of architecture and social behaviour, while his masterly ability to weave character and social history drew comparisons to George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize was fourth-time short-listed Julian Barnes (the only short-listed author to receive the blessing of critics) for his novel The Sense of an Ending. Inviting comparisons to Ford and James with his device of an unreliable narrator, Barnes explored the way people edit and reedit their memories in order to create selves that they can live with. Tony, the protagonist, is a lacklustre 60-year-old whose conventional life has featured a job in arts administration, fatherhood, and an amicable divorce. When he is mysteriously bequeathed the diary of a truth-seeking, Camus-reading school friend who committed suicide 40 years earlier, Tony is confronted with the limitations of his own personal fiction. The Daily Telegraph newspaper called The Sense of an Ending “brief but masterful.”

The British-dominated Man Booker short list also contained Carol Birch’s 11th novel, Jamrach’s Menagerie, likened by one reviewer to the best work of two-time Booker winner Peter Carey. Birch tells the story of an eight-year-old boy who is plucked from the jaws of a marauding tiger by its owner, Mr. Jamrach, and plunged into an outlandish new life. The story was based on such historical figures as Charles Jamrach, the 19th-century importer of wild animals and birds, and such events as the sinking in 1820 of the whaling ship Essex. Birch’s novel was rich with historically accurate detail: streets awash with blood and brine, three-masted clippers from India resting in the Thames, and colourful seafaring misfits.

While Birch made convincing use of the 19th-century vernacular in her novel, Stephen Kelman, also short-listed, provided insight into the language and culture of a contemporary Peckham housing estate in his first novel, Pigeon English. Kelman’s rite-of-passage saga, based on the highly publicized murder in 2000 of black schoolboy Damilola Taylor and narrated from the perspective of an 11-year-old boy from Ghana living in a public housing tenement, was the subject of fierce bidding wars between publishers. Also short-listed was Snowdrops, the debut of A.D. Miller (former Moscow correspondent for The Economist magazine), about a British lawyer who is seduced by Moscow’s gangster-driven culture. Snowdrops derived its name from the Moscow slang for a corpse hidden under the snow.

With two debut and two second-time novelists on the Man Booker short list, it was a year for notable newcomers. Not least among them was Indian-born British writer Kishwar Desai, who had won the 2010 Costa First Novel Award with Witness the Night (2010), about a teenage girl who is found surrounded by 13 dead bodies and the social worker who tries to help her. Desai’s twin theme was the culling of female fetuses in India and the oppression in Indian society of girls who survive birth. Her novel was commended for combining fiction with facts about a social issue while keeping readers captivated.

Maggie O’Farrell won the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Novel Award in 2011 for The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), a complex look at the unreliability of memory and the ties that connect people across time.Matt Crossick—PA Photos/LandovThe winner of the Costa 2010 Novel Award was Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel, The Hand That First Held Mine (2010). Like The Stranger’s Child and The Sense of an Ending, O’Farrell’s novel posed questions about the unreliability of memory. Set in two time frames, it opened with the story of a bored graduate who runs away from a Devon backwater to become a groundbreaking journalist, single mother, and free spirit in the heart of Soho’s post-World War II art scene. It then treated the postpartum blues of Elina, a Finnish artist living in 21st-century London, after the traumatic birth of her son. As Elina’s partner, Ted, begins to unravel—experiencing hazy flashbacks, blank spots in his memories, and panic attacks—the connection between the stories is revealed. Emma Hagestadt in The Independent newspaper described O’Farrell’s focus on “a father’s postnatal ravings” as an “inspired upending of literary convention.”

One of 2011’s best-selling novels was David Nicholls’s sleeper hit One Day (2009), voted Galaxy Book of the Year for 2010. The novel opens on July 15, 1988, with a postfinals fling between two students in Edinburgh and revisits their subsequent friendship on the same date for the next 20 years. The Guardian newspaper ascribed its phenomenal success (over a million copies sold) to the fact that it was both “roaringly funny” and “in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound,” while Iain Hollingshead in The Telegraph called it “the best British novel of the past 20 years.” Its detractors were equally hyperbolic, accusing Nicholls of having served up clichés and one-dimensional stereotypical characters.

A more serious novel to top the best-seller list (albeit briefly) was Jewish Ukrainian Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a book completed in 1960 but published only after having been smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1980. BBC Radio 4’s massive adaptation of the book, featuring actors Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant (and made available for free download), was part of a deliberate campaign by Mark Damazer, former controller of Radio 4, to rehabilitate the neglected masterpiece as the War and Peace of the 20th century. Historian Antony Beevor shored up Damazer’s project, declaring Grossman’s 900-page account of the struggle between Stalinism and Nazism to be “more important than Doctor Zhivago and The Gulag Archipelago.”

While commentators in 2010 had predicted that a glut of fiscal calamity novels would emerge in 2011, little notable fiction was published on this theme. One exception was Robert Harris’s financial thriller The Fear Index. Unfolding over 24 hours in Geneva, Harris’s novel featured a mathematical genius who made billions for himself and his hedge-fund investors with a computer program that traded by predicting fear in the market. The novel was fast-paced and gripping, but as Charles Cumming wrote in The Spectator magazine, its real purpose was to “skewer the hubris and greed of the financial classes.”

The political and social angst precipitated by the financial crisis was treated more directly in nonfiction, though the onslaught of books on this theme abated compared with recent years. Masters of Nothing: How the Crash Will Happen Again Unless We Understand Human Nature captured headlines with its description of the ire of Sir Fred Goodwin (former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland) over the serving of a plate of pink wafers during afternoon tea. Highlighting the role of irrational and self-interested behaviour in economic decision making, Conservative backbencher Matthew Hancock and his co-writer, Nadhim Zahawi (also a Conservative MP), presented a blueprint for legislation to protect the public against corporate negligence. Meanwhile, Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class expressed indignation over the segregation along lines of class and income that deepened in British society after the financial crash. Besides analyzing the causes of the imbalance of power in Britain’s economic and social structure, Jones attacked middle-class stereotypes of the working class that reinforced their “invisible prison.” Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11, a memoir by Alistair Darling (a Labour MP) of his tenure as chancellor of the Exchequer during the collapse of Northern Rock bank, painted Gordon Brown’s leadership during the recession as opportunistic, dishonest, and self-defeating. Notwithstanding Darling’s damning portrayal of the former prime minister, reviewers described Darling as “a decent man who does not exaggerate” and his book as “both fair and accurate.”

Soul-searching about less-recent British history appeared in an impressive spate of new writing about the legacies of the Empire. Richard Gott’s Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt examined Britain’s record of cruelty and genocidal repression from the 1750s to the Indian revolt of 1857–58, further debunking the myth of Britain’s “civilizing mission.” BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman took a similarly antiheroic approach to the subject of imperial agents in Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British. While Paxman’s book was well received as a witty and colourful introduction to imperial history, commentators pointed out that its subtitle was misleading, as its analysis of the corrosive effect of empire on its so-called builders was fleeting and superficial. The anti-Empire chorus was joined by Tory MP and historian Kwasi Kwarteng, who countered the celebration of empire among neoconservative elements in his party with Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World. Kwarteng argued that the overly self-confident public-school-bred individualism of Empire builders paired with the autonomy granted them led to messy and tragic decision making.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography was widely hailed as an encyclopaedic, impartial, and magnificent account of the city’s 3,000-year history of spirituality, conquest, and conflict. As Beevor dryly observed in his review for The Guardian, Montefiore’s sweeping chronicle of war, rape, sadistic torture, and religion-inspired slaughter was “likely to confirm atheist prejudices.”

Like Jerusalem: The Biography, the winner of the 2010 Costa Biography Award and one of 2011’s best-selling books was not, strictly speaking, a biography. Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) told the story of a collection of netsuke, traditional carved wood or ivory toggles from Japan. De Waal traced their movement from his distant cousin Charles, through the hands of Charles’s cousin’s baroness wife Emmy, their rescue from the Nazis by Emmy’s personal maid (who hid them in her mattress), and their eventual miraculous reunion with Emmy’s daughter, de Waal’s grandmother. The book captivated readers with its evocations of Paris, Tokyo, and Vienna and its historical anecdotes. Part family memoir, part travelogue, it was also a meditation on the way objects accumulate meaning.

The short list of the recently renamed Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books featured works that combined anecdote with fact, making engaging reading for the nonspecialist. Alex Bellos’s Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (2010), for example, opened with a description of a linguist’s onerous monthlong journey to reach the Amazonian Munduruku, a people who cannot count higher than the number five. Bellos went on to describe the history and personalities of mathematics from Euclid to the supercomputer, from the Greek cult of Pythagoras to the importance of geometry in origami. As one reviewer noted, “Even those suffering from a phobia about maths would find his book revealing and insightful.” Ian Sample similarly made quantum physics accessible in Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle (2010), a book about the human drama behind the search for the world’s most elusive subatomic particle.

The science writer who grabbed the most headlines was once again atheist Richard Dawkins, this time for his children’s book The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True. Designed, in part, to counter what he regarded as the pernicious effects of fairy tales and religion, The Magic of Reality opened with a definition of reality as “everything that exists” and then sought to answer questions such as “Who was the first person?” and “What is an earthquake?” Many critics berated Dawkins for his crude ultramaterialist view and unsophisticated understanding of religion.

Judges of the Forward Prize for Poetry were more concerned with consciousness than materialism when they awarded Scottish poet John Burnside the £10,000 (about $15,900) prize for his collection Black Cat Bone. The judges, including former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, said that it had “a vitality of language, an undertow of complexity, and an evocative dream logic.” Eyebrows were raised, however, by the absence of women from the Forward Prize’s six-poet short list. The winner of the 2010 Costa Poetry Award was female poet Jo Shapcott for Of Mutability (2010), a collection written after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Kate Kellaway in The Observer newspaper remarked that the poem “Procedure” was simple but moving, “a hymn to tea and a thank you—to whom it may concern—for being alive to drink it.” At year’s end nonagenarian crime writer P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, was issued.

United States

Social historians would probably mark 2011 as the year in American literature when electronic books, or e-books, surpassed hardcover books in sales. As early as 2007, serious American fiction writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler—in what might have been a first—had bypassed print publishing entirely and brought out Weegee Stories exclusively as an electronically delivered book on the Web site Narrrative. According to Publisher’s Weekly magazine, in the first six months of 2011, sales of adult hardcover books declined 23.7%, and adult paperbacks dropped 26.6%. Meanwhile e-books recorded a staggering 161.3% increase in sales. In the mass market, sales of paperbacks ($232.5 million) were less than half of those of e-books ($473.8 million). (See Sidebar.)

Fiction lovers would also recall 2011 as a period rich in new work by some of the masters of modern fiction and some startlingly talented younger writers. The Library of America issued Novels & Stories, 1963–1973, an offering of some of Kurt Vonnegut’s best novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat’s Cradle, and some of Vonnegut’s better-known short stories. Slaughterhouse-Five, first published in 1969, introduces World War II veteran Billy Pilgrim, a prisoner-of-war survivor of the Allied firebombing raid on Dresden. More than 40 years after its initial publication, readers could still respond to Vonnegut’s cry for sanity and appreciate his famous refrain, “So it goes,” signifying the trivial and the devastating passage of all things. Meanwhile, a batch of previously uncollected Vonnegut stories appeared under the title While Mortals Sleep.

A few octogenarians published novels during the year. Pulitzer Prize winner William Kennedy (83) brought out Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, set in Cuba in 1957 (with a cameo appearance by novelist Ernest Hemingway) and his native Albany, N.Y., which he had celebrated so vividly in many of his other books. Distinguished and much-lauded John Barth (81) released Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons, which begins with the opening of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and progresses from there to allude to various other novels and poems as it tells a story that Barth began with protagonist George I. Newett in his 2008 short-story sequence The Development. The novel explores a number of coincidences related to the visions that Newett sees on the first day of the seasons. Multiprizewinning novelist and storyteller E.L. Doctorow (80) issued All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories, which revealed news not just about the world but also about the mysteries that lie at the heart of human behaviour, thus bringing the reader near to the resonance at the heart of ordinary life. Septuagenarian Don DeLillo (75), one of the most respected and admired novelists of the 21st century, released his first collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda, which gathered pieces published between 1979 and 2011.

The year also offered a pair of spectacular literary debuts. Balkan-born Téa Obreht signed in with The Tiger’s Wife, set in the Balkans in the aftermath of war; the work was nominated for the National Book Award. Chad Harbach (the cofounder and coeditor of n+1, a journal published thrice yearly) made his bow with The Art of Fielding, set in a college town in Wisconsin (where Harbach was reared). This graceful book, a novel about how to read and how to write, could also be categorized as a baseball novel, a college novel, and thus a coming-of-age novel about families (by birth and by life choices), and a novel about how to live, how to love, and how to die. Cleaning Nabokov’s House by Leslie Daniels was also an extremely pleasurable debut, or as charming as a book on the subject of the perils of love and single parenthood could be. The narrator, while cleaning her upstate New York rental house (purportedly once the residence of the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov when he taught at Cornell University), unearths the manuscript of a novel that may or may not have been written by the former resident. This find leads her to discover her own latent powers as a writer and as a person in her own right.

What seems merely descriptive in Denis Johnson’s spare and straightforwardly narrated short novel Train Dreams becomes emotionally evocative, a beautifully made word engraving on the page. The memorable narrative, which finally came out in hardcover, was slightly different when it was initially published in 2002 in the Paris Review. In When the Killing’s Done, T.C. Boyle sailed out to the Channel Islands of Anacapa and Santa Cruz for a raucous battle between animal rights activists and a government biologist. Caleb’s Crossing, by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, visits Martha’s Vineyard in the 17th century and dramatizes quite effectively the life of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard University. Bruce Duffy’s novel Disaster Was My God is a fictional biography of French poet and adventurer Arthur Rimbaud, and longtime writer and reviewer Alan Cheuse chimed in with Song of Slaves in the Desert, a historical fiction set mainly in slaver Africa and a mid-19th-century Charleston, S.C., plantation, where a family of Sephardic Jews hold slaves and cultivate rice.

New Mexico and New York served as the settings for Laura Furman’s latest story collection, The Mother Who Stayed, which includes a beautifully made story cluster that examines the relationships between mothers and daughters. Widow: Stories, by California writer Michelle Latiolais, a story miscellany with a focus on widowhood and bereavement, includes an investigation of the very word: “In Sanskrit the word means empty. And in the Old Testament, God instructs Moses that a widow is in the same category as profane and whore.” The widowed author goes on to produce an incisive exploration of her state of being: the constancy of grief. Another talented California writer, San Francisco-based Carol Edgarian, after 17 years of silence delivered a novel titled Three Stages of Amazement. An ambitious doctor, a troubled wife, and a mysterious San Francisco family inheritance all make for a beautifully written and deeply engaging novel set in the depths of the economic crisis.

Impressive new novels came from Russell Banks, whose Lost Memory of Skin (a searing look at the dark lives of sex offenders) would not be easily forgotten; Kate Christensen, whose The Astral told the story of a middle-aged Brooklyn poet as his marriage unravels at the seams; Bonnie Jo Campbell, who released Once upon a River, a wonderfully made (Michigan) coming-of-age novel; and Ann Patchett, whose State of Wonder, an Amazonian journey, stayed on the best-seller list for many weeks. Peter Orner, a writer with a slow-growing but deserved reputation for deeply felt and intelligent novels, showed off his latest, Love and Shame and Love, which explores the individual secret shame and search for love by three generations of a Chicago family. Mexican-born Chicago-based writer Luis Alberto Urrea continued the saga he began in The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005) with Queen of America.

Though few American writers attempted to experiment in the vein in which James Joyce had in Ulyssses, Chicago writer Jesse Ball led the way with The Curfew, his third novel. In his second work, The Way Through Doors (2009), he had tipped his hat to Joyce by opening with a giant letter Y. In The Curfew, the story of one family’s struggle against an unnamed totalitarian regime, Ball suppresses the urge to deploy giant type until fully 50 pages into the story, but used thusly it feels, alas, more like mannerism than experiment. Cuban American writer Ana Menéndez (based variously in Amsterdam and Miami) produced Adios, Happy Homeland!, a brilliant meld of tradition and Modernism based on the work of an imaginary cadre of Cuban writers and poets. Ann Beattie, one of the country’s most applauded short-story writers, relied on her imagination and information gleaned from magazines and relatives and friends of Pat Nixon to shape Mrs. Nixon, the story of the writer’s struggle to portray the world as seen through the eyes of the former first lady.

New Mexico’s Rudolfo Anaya, a foremost Chicano writer, played successfully with allegory in his novel Randy Lopez Goes Home. California novelist Percival Everett employed the police procedural in Assumption, a novel in three parts about a black New Mexico sheriff’s deputy with an overriding problem of perception. The title of West Coast writer Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life was borrowed from a line by Henry David Thoreau. The work showed her in full-blown experimental mode, making personal and social explorations in a long narrative poem.

Story collections came in from Midwestern writer Valerie Laken (Separate Kingdoms), Idaho writer Alan Heathcock (Volt), and Los Angeles-based Danzy Senna (You Are Free). Two of the country’s most popular and successful novelists, John Grisham and Stephen King, signed in with new books, The Litigators and 11/22/63, respectively.

The year was replete with new poetry volumes from prizewinning and highly treasured poets. Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky offered New and Selected Poems, and another former laureate, Billy Collins, released Horoscopes for the Dead. The Chameleon Couch by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa appeared, along with Money Shot, a new collection by Rae Armantrout.

Come, Thief, by Marin county, Calif., resident Jane Hirshfield included the popular poem “A Blessing for Wedding”:

Today when persimmons ripenToday when fox-kits come out of their den into snowToday when the spotted egg releases its wren songToday when the maple sets down its red leaves

Other pleasing poetry volumes included Traveling Light by Linda Pastan, Lucifer at the Starlite by Kim Addonizio, In the Shadow of Al-Andalus by Victor Hernandez Cruz, and New and Selected Poems, 1957–2011 by Robert Sward.

Among translations, John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations stood out, as did Stephen Mitchell’s milestone version of the Iliad, based on recently established texts.

Two fine fiction writers overtook the memoir market in both substance and style. Joyce Carol Oates released A Widow’s Story, and Francisco Goldman offered his account of his young wife’s death in Say Her Name. Story writer Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Joseph Heller—Just One Catch—was followed by the appearance of Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 by Heller’s daughter, Erica. There were mixed reviews for Kenneth Slawenski’s J.D. Salinger: A Life (2010).

Some volumes were published that were of great interest to historians. They included Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Joelle Biele, and What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Suzanne Marrs.

The 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to American novelist and short-story writer Jennifer Egan for her inventive novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.Henny Ray Abrams/APThe Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to 2010’s A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; the prize for history was awarded to The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) by Eric Foner; the biography prize was claimed by Washington: A Life (2010) by Ron Chernow; the poetry prize was bestowed on The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) by former poet laureate Kay Ryan; and the general nonfiction prize was captured by The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg took the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story went to Edith Pearlman. The five nominees for the National Book Award for Fiction were Andrew Krivak (The Sojurn), Obreht (The Tiger’s Wife), Julie Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic), Pearlman (Binocular Vision), and Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones). Ward took the fiction award for her novel about a poor black Louisiana family riding out Hurricane Katrina. The award for nonfiction went to Stephen Greenblatt for his intellectually stimulating book—The Swerve—on the work of Roman writer Lucretius and its links to modern life. Nikky Finney won the prize in poetry for Head Off & Split, her fourth book of poems.

Among the deaths during the year were those of writers Reynolds Price, Wilfrid Sheed, and Lillian Jackson Braun. Also leaving the literary scene was feminist writer E.M. Broner, who wrote of the difficulties she encountered as a woman and a Jew.

Canada

Tales of the frontier were abundant in Canadian literature in 2011. Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers was an account of a fraternal pair of outlaws’ belligerent excursion through the underworld of the Old West; Pauline Holdstock’s Into the Heart of the Country explored how the tragic clash of European and indigenous cultures in western Canada continued to affect events many years later, and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s A Good Man crossed many borders—political, emotional, physical, and factual—in this tale of love and revenge. On the opposite coast, Wayne Johnston’s A World Elsewhere crisscrossed eastern borderlands in a sweeping story of ambition, remorse, and hope that reached from St. John’s, Nfd., to Princeton, N.J., and to a grand mansion, Vanderland, in the hills of North Carolina.

In 2011 Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s novel Half Blood Blues won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was short-listed for both the Man Booker Prize in the U.K. and the Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada.Lefteris Pitarakis/APMoving forward in time, Marina Endicott’s The Little Shadows, set in the early 20th century, followed three intrepid young women as they danced and sang in vaudeville shows throughout the west, and Alexi Zentner’s Touch, in a story that spanned three generations in a boom-and-bust town in northern British Columbia, introduced golden caribou and dogs that sang. Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues, a jazz-soaked saga of love, fear, opportunism, and defiance, took place in Paris in 1940. An ocean liner in the ’50s was the setting for The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, the surreal sea-bound sojourn of a Ceylonese boy at the beginning of a lifelong odyssey.

The Free World by David Bezmozgis, set in Italy in the 1970s, related how three generations of Russian Jews coped with the long wait for visas to a new life. In Frances Itani’s Requiem, a road trip west became an extended metaphor for an inner journey, with many side trips, through the driver’s long-neglected memories, while in Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist, a man psychologically dismembers himself in order to become whole. Suzette Mayr’s Monoceros revealed how a young man’s suicide affected many, even those beyond his immediate circle of family and friends.

Short-story collections included Zsuzsi Gartner’s Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, in which lively juxtapositions of lifestyles, values, and expectations (arranged for best satiric effect) were set in the urban wilderness of Vancouver. The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise, which centred on the Indo-American experience (about people from various parts of India immigrating to the U.S.) and featured a collection of memorable individuals who encountered one another with often disruptive force; Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden, the place where a ragged coterie of characters searched for the missing bits of their lives; and Jessica Westhead’s And Also Sharks, which was a study (both humorous and disconcerting) of characters who seem to act without a normal moral compass and yet elicit excited laughter more than condemnation.

The themes of death and mourning as well as life and acceptance informed several poetry collections, including Lorna Crozier’s Small Mechanics, which was involved with the powerful interlocking gears of aging, bereavement, and hope as one’s life rolls forward; Oyama Pink Shale by Sharon Thesen, which celebrated the life and mourned the passing of a colleague, poet Robin Blaser; and Origami Dove by Susan Musgrave, a sometimes in-your-face, sometimes delicate rendition of the intermingled shades of grief and comic despair.

Some books of poetry were extended variations on other literary forms. Garry Thomas Morse’s Discovery Passages, based on stories both oral and written, resurrected and reconstructed the acts and consequences of European interventions in traditional indigenous cultures, and Phil Hall’s Killdeer contained a collection of thoughtful passages on becoming a poet, combined with elegiac musings on the lives and deaths of fellow Canadian poets.

Science inspired some poets, as evidenced by Anne Simpson’s Is, wherein the cell was envisioned as a microcosm within a macrocosm that was itself a microcosm, elements of each intricately intertwined. From a more skeptical angle, Leigh Kotsilidis’s Hypotheticals challenged the underpinnings of the scientific method itself with a collection of questions based on a double reading of the title, while in Jacob McArthur Mooney’s Folk, a tragic airplane crash launched an investigation into the internal psychological geometry of modern civilized humans and their varied societies as well as their limits and structural values.

Graphic novels came into their own during the year. The Listener by David Lester combined a well-structured story, illustrated in a mix of styles, that reflected back upon itself how art can be both used and abused as a vehicle for ends beyond art.

Other Literature in English

Much of sub-Saharan Africa and Australasia’s literary resources remained vibrant during 2011, as evidenced by the production of notable works written in English that were published and honoured throughout the year. This occurred even as widespread famine and drought persisted throughout the Horn of Africa and wildfires, floods, and earthquakes halfway across the globe in Australia and New Zealand took their toll.

Somali-born Nuruddin Farah (shown here in a 2003 photo) in 2011 published Crossbones, the long-awaited finale to his most recent trilogy of novels, Past Imperfect.Matthias Schumann—dpa/LandovIn Africa internationally acclaimed Somali-born author Nuruddin Farah brought out his 11th novel—the last in a trilogy (following Links [2003] and Knots [2006])—entitled Crossbones, which offered a timely and engaging look at the extreme conditions in his native country. Two Ethiopian authors, Maaza Mengiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, 2010) and Dinaw Mengestu (How to Read the Air, 2010) were short-listed in the fiction category of the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, “the first and only U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace.” The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book went to Aminatta Forna (a Scottish-born author raised in Sierra Leone) for her novel The Memory of Love (2010), praised by the judges for its “risk-taking, elegance, and breadth.”

Elsewhere, Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo garnered the 12th edition of Africa’s Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Hitting Budapest,” and Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina, winner of the 2002 Caine Prize, continued to impress with his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place.

Acclaimed Australian poet, novelist, and short-story writer David Malouf brought out The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World, a monograph in which he called for a return to the “highest wisdom” of the classics to find meaning and fulfillment. Tim Winton, one of Australia’s finest novelists and short-story writers, saw the production of his first play, Rising Water. The annual Miles Franklin Literary Award for best novel, the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Gold Medal, and other major prizes went to Kim Scott’s third novel, That Deadman Dance (2010), which was set in early 19th-century Western Australia and examined the initial contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

In nearby New Zealand, many of the country’s outstanding and most promising writers were recognized by the second annual New Zealand Post Book Awards. Among the 2011 recipients (for books published in 2010) were Laurence Fearnley, for The Hut Builder (Fiction); Kate Camp, for The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (Poetry); and triple winner Chris Bourke, for Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music, 1918–1964 (Book of the Year, General Nonfiction Book of the Year, and People’s Choice Award).

The year 2011 also marked the passing of a number of important literary figures, including British-born Australian writer Hazel Rowley; New Zealand diplomat, civil servant, author, and academic Denis McLean; South African poet Stephen Watson; South African poet and biographer Patrick Cullinan; Australian fiction writer Tom Hungerford; New Zealand journalist, publisher, and author Dame Christine Cole Catley; Kenyan author Margaret A. Ogola; Australian fantasy writer Sara Douglass; Australian author and Aboriginal historian Ruby Langford Ginibi; and Australian publisher Diana Gribble.

German

German writer Eugen Ruge won the German Book Prize for his first novel, In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts, which treated an extended family’s relationship to East Germany.Alex Domanski—Reuters/LandovThe winner of the German Book Prize for 2011 was Eugen Ruge for In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts, his historical novel about East Germany (the former German Democratic Republic; GDR). The book told the moving story of three generations of socialists, their relationship to the East German state, and their gradual loss of faith in their political ideals. The grandson ultimately leaves East Germany in the final years of its existence—just as the novel’s author did. Antje Rávic Strubel’s novel Sturz der Tage in die Nacht also dealt with the former East German state, especially with the legacy of Stasi, its secret-police agency. The novel’s protagonist, as an adolescent girl, enters into a sexual relationship with a Stasi officer, is abandoned by him, bears his child, and gives it up for adoption. After the collapse of the GDR, these long-ago events return to haunt the now middle-aged protagonist as she once again encounters both the son she gave up and her former lover; this meeting has a tragic, Oedipal outcome because a love affair develops between mother and son, suggesting that it may be impossible for the present generation to escape the burden of East German history.

Another family novel that examined 20th-century German history—this time events in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich—was Astrid Rosenfeld’s Adams Erbe, which told the story in a lighthearted vein of several generations of a German-Jewish family and in particular of the relationship in the late 1930s between a woman named Anna and the Adam of the title. Their relationship throughout the terrible events of 1938 is detailed in Adam’s diary, discovered by the book’s narrator, his grandnephew Eddy.

Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau addressed the ecological endangerment of Earth. The protagonist of this novel is a scientist who studies the gradual melting of the world’s great ice sheets and who gives lectures on a cruise ship bound for Antarctica. His pessimism about the human race and the future of Earth culminates in a radical act of desperation. He leaves behind the message: “The individual human being is a riddle, but several billions of human beings, organized into a parasitical system, are a catastrophe.”

Almost as critical of the contemporary world was Thomas Melle’s novel Sickster, which detailed the relationship between two former high-school acquaintances who have taken different paths in the corporate world. One is an apparently successful businessman who fills the emptiness of his life with sex and alcohol; the other is a frustrated and sidelined writer. When one becomes interested in the other’s girlfriend, events begin to spin out of control. Jan Peter Bremer’s Der amerikanische Investor also concerned the globalized world of contemporary capitalism, exploring the life of a Berlin writer whose apartment building was purchased by the eponymous American investor. The question posed in the novel was whether it is possible to address or even locate a capitalism that knows neither borders nor resting points.

Austrian authors Marlene Streeruwitz and Ludwig Laher both explored the potential for violence and pain in contemporary Europe. Streeruwitz’s novel Die Schmerzmacherin concerned a woman who decides to leave the private security company she works for because of moral qualms about the violence that characterizes the company’s working methods; however, she finds that leaving such a company is far more difficult than she had imagined. Laher’s novel Verfahren examined the plight of political and economic refugees and the difficulty they have gaining admittance into prosperous first-world countries such as Austria. Its protagonist, Jelena, a survivor of unspeakable brutality in the former Yugoslavia, is forced to deal with an uncaring bureaucracy in the very country where she has sought refuge.

One of the most talked-about novels of the year was Charlotte Roche’s erotic and semiautobiographical novel Schossgebete, which dealt with a woman’s effort to overcome a horrible family tragedy by means of sex.

The 84-year-old Martin Walser published the novel Muttersohn, a grand summary of some of the themes that had long been present in his oeuvre: love, literature, language, and neurosis. The novel’s protagonist has a particularly close relationship to his mother and therefore a strong sense of belonging in and to the world, but when he starts to work at a psychiatric institution, he must learn to deal with people who do not share his sense of belonging.

Finally, Niklas Maak’s novel Fahrtenbuch—really a series of interconnected stories—presented the recent history of Germany by looking at a Mercedes 350 SL automobile and its diverse owners, from 1971 through the postunification period.

French

France

Ninety-three-year-old former French Resistance fighter and diplomat Stéphane Hessel caused a worldwide literary sensation with his essay Indignez-vous!—a rallying cry that went viral.Antonio Calanni/APThe surprise best seller in 2011 was an essay barely longer than a pamphlet, Indignez-vous! (2010) by Stéphane Hessel, a 93-year-old former French Resistance fighter and prisoner at Buchenwald who later helped write the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Indignez-vous! (which was published in English in 2011 as Time for Outrage!), Hessel called upon youths in France to renew their indignation for all political injustice, including the growing gap between rich and poor, the treatment of illegal immigrants, the slow death of the free press, and the Palestinians’ plight. Hessel’s message quickly crossed French borders once his book had been translated into more than a dozen languages, selling 3.5 million copies worldwide and inspiring both Los Indignados (the Spanish youth movement) and the U.S. protest movement Occupy Wall Street.

The success of the nonfictional Indignez-vous! set the tone for the year’s French literature, which showed a clear preponderance of works based in fact rather than fiction, especially with the heavy representation of autofiction, the genre of fictionalized autobiography widely practiced in France for two decades. In Comment gagner sa vie honnêtement (2010), Jean Rouaud continued his famous series of autofictions, concentrating this time on the 1970s, when refusing to compromise and embark on a steady career path, he instead wandered from job to job, discovering in his adventures the writer he would later become. In Le Livre des brèves amours éternelles, Andreï Makine recounted 50 years of his life—from the Soviet orphanage of his childhood to the Russia of his youth and the France of his later life—through the prism of his encounters with women, each of whom contributed a lesson to his sentimental education. In Un Homme de passage, Serge Doubrovsky cast a backward glance at his life’s path and reflected on the women who accompanied him. It was a voyage he saw as increasingly overshadowed by ever-approaching decrepitude and death.

Three of the year’s best-selling autofictional works discussed the loss of a loved one. For Annie Ernaux, in L’Autre Fille, the inspiration was her sudden discovery at age 10 of a sister who had fallen victim to diphtheria two years before the author’s birth and who had been idealized in death, to whom the author would always come second in her parents’ eyes. This circumstance produced in the celebrated author a deep heartache to which she suspected she might owe her career as a writer. In Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit, Delphine de Vigan wrote of her mother, dead by suicide, in an attempt to determine what in her mother’s seemingly joyful life could have led her to such unsupportable despair. Finally, in the autofictional Ce qu’aimer veut dire, winner of the year’s Médicis literary prize, Mathieu Lindon wrote of the death of the two men who most helped him grow to maturity—his father, publisher Jérôme Lindon, and his friend, the world-renowned philosopher Michel Foucault.

Three volumes of biofiction, a genre that blurred the boundary between biography and fiction, also proved to be best sellers. Laurent Mauvignier, in Ce que j’appelle oubli, spun his story from an actual crime committed in 2009. The book featured a down-and-out immigrant from Martinique who was beaten to death in a Lyon, France, supermarket by four security guards for drinking a can of beer without having paid. From this tragedy, Mauvignier’s tale resurrected the victim, giving a voice to someone who in life barely had one and finding dignity in the humblest of individuals. In Limonov, Emmanuel Carrère sketched the stranger-than-fiction life of the Russian adventurer Eduard Limonov. From life as a Ukrainian hoodlum to a literary life in Paris, Limonov went to soldiering in the Balkans, to street life in the United States as well as life among the American jet set, and later to the leadership of an extremist party in Russia. The book won the Prix Renaudot. The Prix Femina was awarded to Simon Liberati for his biofictional Jayne Mansfield, 1967, which retraced the life of American starlet Jayne Mansfield backward from her death in a car accident in 1967 to the start of her career in 1950s Hollywood through those decades’ transformative upheaval. The double win of literary prizes for biofictional works gave the genre a new cachet likely to ensure its further expansion.

Best-selling works of historical fiction also straddled the boundary between fact and fiction, placing themselves by the precision of their research closer to documentary treatises than to novels in their frank examination of France’s often disastrous colonial relations. In Kampuchéa, Patrick Deville documented the role of the French in the history of Cambodia, beginning with Henri Mouhot’s discovery of the temples of Angkor in 1860. He described the concurrent spread of the ideas the French occupation brought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and the Reign of Terror, all of which combined in the 1970s to help produce the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge. In Plantation Massa-Lanmaux, Yann Garvoz set his tale of racism largely on an 18th-century Antillean sugarcane plantation. The landlord’s son attempts to apply the ideas of the Enlightenment to his father’s slave-run farm and thereby foments a slave revolt and brings about the plantation’s destruction by fire and his own paranoiac insanity. In Alexis Jenni’s L’Art français de la guerre, a former captain of the French army recounted 18 years of French wars—starting with the disgrace of World War II and continuing into the dirty wars of French imperialist colonization in Indochina and Algeria, with all the savagery and torture that were their hallmark—a story with little fictional about it besides its narrator. Together with Carrère’s Renaudot prize, Liberati’s Femina, and Lindon’s Médicis, Jenni’s Prix Goncourt meant that works in which nonfiction outweighed fiction had swept all four main literary prizes in an official recognition of the nonfiction trend that had long been growing in France’s literature.

Canada

During the 2011 Salon du Livre, Montreal’s French-language book fair considered the publishing event of the year, the entertainment paper Voir featured a stark front-page announcement: “49% of Québécois can’t read this paper.” Despite another successful year in book publishing, the truth remained that half the population did not have the skills to read a book. A rare subject of consensus in 2011 was outrage over the ruling Conservative Party’s cuts to arts funding, but French Quebec’s protests did not have much power to sway the majority government. It was a big year for novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and all-around provocateur Victor-Lévy Beaulieu. He won French Quebec’s Prix Gilles-Corbeil—at $100,000, Canada’s richest French-language prize—as well as finishing his monumental Beauchemin saga with the novel Antiterre. Among other winners was Élise Turcotte, who picked up the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal for her novel Guyana, which used the events at Jonestown as a starting point. Writers from far-flung areas of the province of Quebec had their say too. Jocelyne Saucier from the Abitibi region of northwestern Quebec was the surprise winner of Le Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie with her novel Il pleuvait des oiseaux; the prize was open to French-language writers throughout the world. Samuel Archibald made a name for himself with Arvida (the name of a town in the Abitibi), a grab bag of stories and legends and cock-eyed characters. It was published by the relatively new company Le Quartanier, which was quickly becoming a magnet for younger writers. A rapper-turned-author who went by the name Biz attracted media attention with La Chute de Sparte, a story of suicide set in a high school. His novel explored the difficulty of growing up male in today’s society. In the realm of nonfiction, two works based on Quebec social phenomena were noteworthy. They included Pierre Nepveu’s biography of poet Gaston Miron (Gaston Miron: la vie d’un homme), whose career was intimately involved with the Quebec independence movement, and longtime left-wing feminist and activist Françoise David chipped in with De colère et d’espoir, an expression of anger and hope.

Quebec society mourned the passing in August of novelist and journalist Gil Courtemanche, who was best known for his novel Un Dimanche à la piscine à Kigali (2000). The work, which chronicled the 1994 Rwandan genocide, was translated into more than 20 languages and was adapted for the large screen in 2006.

Italian

The winner of the Campiello Prize for 2011 was Andrea Molesini’s historical novel Non tutti i bastardi sono di Vienna (2010). A magisterially written war bildungsroman, it narrated the coming-of-age of an aristocratic boy in occupied Veneto after the 1917 Battle of Caporetto. After the family villa is requisitioned by the enemy, Paolo, a prisoner in his own home, finds a path to dignity by becoming a spy against the enemy army. Eight stories set in the provincial Sicilian town of Vigata made up Andrea Camilleri’s Gran circo Taddei e altre storie di Vigàta. The stories, set during the years between the rise of Benito Mussolini and the ’60s, combined elements in the Boccaccian tradition of eroticism, wit, and practical jokes with characteristics of commedia dell’arte.

The protagonist of Marco Malvaldi’s mystery novel Odore di chiuso was the historical figure Pellegrino Artusi, author of the celebrated cookbook La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (1891). The novel portrayed the decline of an aristocratic family, taken aback by the transformations in power relations imposed by the newly unified state of Italy. The beginning of the postunitarian era was also the background for Giuseppina Torregrossa’s novel Manna e miele, ferro e fuoco. Romilda—the daughter of a master of the art of harvesting manna and a bee breeder—is herself gifted with a power to enchant humans and insects. She comes of age in a Sicily that is undergoing deep changes following social and political upheavals. In order to gain control of her spiritual gifts, fully develop her femininity, and achieve emancipation, she must endure the hardships of a repressive marriage.

Several other works of 2011 revolved around female protagonists. Simonetta Agnello Hornby’s Un filo d’olio was an autobiographical account structured around the leitmotif of family cooking and Sicilian peasant culture. The author recounted her golden childhood, growing up, summer after summer, in her family’s country villa and farm. In describing the rituals of a family of the Sicilian landed aristocracy, its close interaction with the peasants, and the many shared traditions, Agnello Hornby composed a complex portrait of post-World War II rural Sicily. Another woman from southern Italy, Mimì Orlando, was the protagonist of Mario Desiati’s novel Ternitti (the word is a Pugliese dialectal variation of the term Eternit). In Mimì, Desiati presented the free-spirited and strong-willed daughter of immigrants who worked for several years in an Eternit fibre cement factory in Switzerland. Mimì returns to her native Puglia, and through her vicissitudes—her commitment to fighting for the rights of returning workers affected by asbestos-related illnesses and of her co-workers threatened by their employer’s plan to relocate production in eastern Europe—Desiati gave a snapshot of contemporary Puglia: a tourist mecca, a land of ancient traditions, an industrialized territory affected by globalization, and a society deeply marked by the tragic consequences of emigration.

The Strega Prize was awarded in 2011 to Italian novelist, translator, and filmmaker Edoardo Nesi for his book Storia della mia gente (2010).Alberto Cristofari—A3/Contrasto/ReduxAfter losing her mother at age six, Mandorla—the protagonist of Chiara Gamberale’s novel Le luci nelle case degli altri—is raised by the tenants of an apartment building in a Roman suburb. As she matures, moving from one household to the other, from ground to top floor, the secret lives of others are revealed through Mandorla’s naive and curious gaze. Michela Murgia dedicated to contemporary women her theological essay on the myth of the Virgin Mary, Ave Mary e la Chiesa inventò la donna. Murgia, herself a theologian, drew attention to the passive role of women in the Christian tradition. Elena Loewenthal spent more than a year volunteering at Italian health facilities to understand how illness affects human existence. She wrote of this experience in La vita è una prova d’orchestra, which described illness from the point of view of patients and their loved ones, an unconventional perspective on the subject. Fulvio Ervas’s L’amore è idrosolubile was a mystery novel with a comedic twist. Through the multicultural gaze of a half-Persian police inspector and through the diary of the crime victim (an unconventional travel agent with a special gift for portraying her lovers’ idiosyncrasies), the productive and yet provincial Italian northeast was revealed as a complex social fabric made up of unscrupulous entrepreneurs, exploited immigrants, depraved professionals, single mothers, disillusioned spinsters, and troubled teenagers. Giulia and Camilla, the protagonists of Enzo Fileno Carabba’s noir, grotesque, and surreal novel Con un poco di zucchero, are representatives of the “threatened species” of old Florentine aristocracy. They lack an ethical sense, and the only consciousness they have is the one of their class, while the values they cherish are elegance and each other’s friendship. By following them in their adventurous, exhilarating endeavours, the reader was transported to a fantastic and yet realistic Florence. Edoardo Nesi won the Strega Prize with his book Storia della mia gente (2010), which stood midway between autobiography and economics essay. It analyzed how globalization affected small- and medium-sized enterprises in the textile city of Prato. Finally, on a sad note, the year also saw the passing of Andrea Zanzotto, one of Italy’s greatest and most acclaimed contemporary poets.

Spanish

Spain

Universal human emotions and, as in several past years, Spain’s recent history were common themes in Spanish literature of 2011. Unsatisfied, hidden, or forbidden wishes were the connecting thread of Marina Mayoral’s Deseos, which narrated the lives of several characters tormented by wishes that they dared not act on or secrets they kept locked in their memories. Los enamoramientos by Javier Marías reflected on the condition known as infatuation, which is generally considered to be positive and sometimes redeeming but could produce bad and even evil behaviour as well as noble and selfless actions. Luis Mateo Díez’s Pájaro sin vuelo traced an unforgettable day when Ismael Cieza’s fragile will was forced to confront the complex contradictions of his life and the shirked responsibilities of his past; the reader was presented with a life conditioned by irresolution in which feelings and ideas were constantly at war.

Several books relating to the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath were also published. Raúl del Pozo’s El reclamo, which was awarded the Primavera Prize, told the story of a former guerrilla fighter, or maquis, living in exile in South America on the banks of the Paraná River who is asked by an American historian for help investigating the maquis that remained in Spain after the Civil War. Another novel on that period was crime novelist Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Donde nadie te encuentre, which took the Nadal Prize. It was based on the true life of a mysterious figure, Teresa Pla Meseguer, who joined the maquis after being humiliated by the Guardia Civil. In the spy novel Operación Gladio, Benjamín Prado guided the reader through Spain’s devious path filled with conquests and renunciations, historical agreements and shameful pacts, during the Transition, as the period from dictatorship to democracy is known. Rafael Reig’s Todo está perdonado depicted the postwar period in both a realistic and an ironic light, including the final years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the Transition. Sex and soccer provided the backdrop of a disturbing police investigation.

Adventure, mystery, and emotion are the predominant elements of El prisionero del cielo by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, third in the author’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books series set in Barcelona of the 1940s and ’50s.

The Planeta Prize went to Javier Moro for his novel El imperio eres tú, about the first emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro I, who supported the nationalist cause against Portugal’s imperial power. The Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez received Spain’s Alfaguara Prize for his work El ruido de las cosas al caer, written under the pseudonym Raúl K. Fen. The novel begins with the escape and hunting of a hippopotamus from the exotic zoo kept by Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

The 2011 National Prize for Narrative was awarded to Marcos Giralt Torrente for his Tiempo de vida (2010), and the National Prize for Poetry went to Francisca Aguirre for her Historia de una anatomía (2010).

The most renowned Spanish-language literary prize, the Cervantes Prize, was awarded to Chilean poet and mathematician Nicanor Parra.

Latin America

Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez won the Alfaguara award in 2011 for El ruido de las cosas al caer, his novel about life amid the violent drug-trafficking world of Colombia in the 1970s.Alberto Estevez—EPA/LandovIn 2011 Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez received the Alfaguara award for his novel El ruido de las cosas al caer. When the protagonist of that work witnesses the murder of a circumstantial friend by hired assassins, his life is shattered by the experience. The narrative reflects Colombian life during the late 1970s, when drug trafficking was pervasive and any sense of the ordinary was obliterated by violence and fear.

Los días del arcoíris, by Chilean author Antonio Skármeta, was awarded the Premio Planeta-Casamérica. In the novel the opposition to Gen. Augusto Pinochet devises a means of winning the 1988 referendum on the dictatorship. The rainbow (arcoíris) of the title was a symbol of hope and also reflected the colours of the political coalition that eventually won the referendum. The narration depicts a hard reality with good humour and cheerfulness.

In his novel Hotel DF (2010), Mexican writer Guillermo Fadanelli presented a microcosm of the Federal District (D.F.) of Mexico. The novel cast a caustic and despairing look at a group of Mexican hotel residents who openly pursue lives of criminality that include illegal dealings, notably in drugs, for individual gain. The narrator is part of the reality depicted, and at times he uses black humour to express his pain for the city he both loves and hates.

Formas de volver a casa, by Chilean Alejandro Zambra, had a postmodern structure: history and fiction were deliberately confused; the narrative perspectives were mixed; and narrator, author, and character seemed to merge. The novel was clear, however, in its criticism of the Pinochet dictatorship as well as of Chile’s transitional governments. The impotence and failure depicted in the novel’s social and political reality also had an impact on the narration’s form and content.

Another novel that mixed fiction and historical fact, this time in an autobiographical key, was Entre dos aguas (2010), by Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. The story was set in Paris, Rome, and Bogotá, all cities in which the author had lived. The protagonist returns to Colombia when he learns that his brother, a colonel in the Colombian army, has committed suicide. Trying to understand his brother’s death, he encounters violence and corruption wherever he goes.

In La muerte de Montaigne, Chilean author Jorge Edwards selected scenes from the life of Michel de Montaigne and showed a fascination with his character that he effortlessly transmitted to the reader. Montaigne wrote that he himself was the topic of his Essays, and the narrator of Edwards’s novel, who identifies with Montaigne, mixes his character’s and his own autobiographical experiences. Montaigne lived in dangerous times, but he managed to avoid involvement in wars and intrigues.

In his novel La fugitiva, Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez presented another fusion of fiction and biography. Three female narrative voices tell the story of a fictional Costa Rican novelist, Amanda Solano, who represents (the author informs the reader) the real-life writer Yolanda Oreamuno. Unconventional and defiant, Oreamuno rejected the bourgeois traditions of her times and her country and led a stormy, tormented, and peripatetic life. The novel offers an ample view of life in each of the Central American countries in which this singular woman lived.

La vida privada, by the Argentine Rodolfo Rabanal, was a literary experiment: the author avoided traditional narrative conventions in his depiction of space, time, and character. His impersonal narrator, called “the one who perceives,” remained without a name and, but for a few personal experiences he relates, almost unknown to the reader. Using these techniques, the author associated this novel with the so-called novela de la mirada or nouveau roman. During a hot summer the “perceiver” contemplates daily life from his balcony in Buenos Aires. From time to time, images of the past and images of the narrator’s childhood neighbourhood are superposed on the perceived reality.

Betibú, by Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro, was an ambitious work that went beyond the usual limits of the detective novel. It centred on two journalists and a writer nicknamed Betibú, who are forced to confront, at their own risk, the power of political pressure and corruption, and they agonize over the best way to convey to their readers the truth about a series of murders in a high-class neighbourhood. The novel succeeds in cleverly showing some of the conflicts between private and public language and between journalism and political power.

Leonora, by Mexican author Elena Poniatowska, was yet another example of the blending of history and fiction. The book, a novelized biography of English-born Mexican painter and writer Leonora Carrington, was awarded the Premio Biblioteca Breve. The narrative depicts Carrington’s life among her lovers and friends in Italy and Spain and later in Mexico and the United States, where the Surrealists took refuge during World War II.

Colombian Darío Jaramillo won the José María de Pereda Award with his short novel Historia de Simona. The work was exceptional for the beauty of its language—a quality not surprising to readers of Jaramillo’s poetry. It relates the story of a passionate love affair between a young man of 21 and a sophisticated woman 21 years his senior. The city of Bogotá provided the setting for the story, but it was not part of the story, because the lovers were too obsessed with themselves to look at their surroundings. Historia de Simona was a rare example of a commonplace topic transformed into a masterpiece.

Two monumental figures in Latin American letters died during the year. Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas and Ernesto Sábato both left the scene.

Portuguese

Portugal

In 2011, as in several previous years, much of Portuguese fiction addressed the political and social transformations of the 1970s and 1980s, examining the end of empire and the transition to democracy. Dulce Maria Cardoso’s novel O retorno received much more media and critical attention than had her earlier works Os meus sentimentos (2005) and O chão dos pardais (2009), despite their having been awarded literary prizes of, respectively, the European Union and the Portuguese PEN Club in 2009. The narrator of O retorno was a troubled teenage boy torn between the cultures of Luanda and Lisbon at the time of the mass exodus of Portuguese colonists from Angola—a social and cultural phenomenon known as the retornados—shortly before that country’s independence in 1975. Cardoso tried to distinguish her book from Isabela Figueiredo’s acclaimed Caderno de memórias coloniais (2009), also about the decolonization of Lusophone Africa in the 1970s, stating in a TV interview that her own work was neither autobiography nor therapeutically oriented.

Portugal’s most internationally acclaimed living author, António Lobo Antunes, who worked as a military doctor in Angola in the 1970s, also tackled the end-of-empire subject in his latest novel, Comissão das lágrimas; the title evoked a postindependence Angolan tribunal that was responsible for the summary sentencing of thousands of citizens in 1977. Another major novelist, Lídia Jorge, published her 10th novel, A noite das mulheres cantoras. Setting her narrative between the 1980s and the present, Jorge dealt with postimperial remembrance by way of a monologue about the perils of success and stardom in Portugal’s musical milieu. Another novel dealing with recent history was Pedro Rosa Mendes’s Peregrinação de Enmanuel Jhesus (2010), a fictionalized work of journalism that took place in East Timor. About José Saramago’s Claraboia, written in the 1950s and rejected by publishers at that time, critic Inês Pedrosa wrote in the O Estado de São Paulo that “the repeated references to the ‘international crisis’ link this novel to our days in a strangely prophetic way.” Other novels of interest were Mário de Carvalho’s Quando o diabo reza, Rui Zink’s O amante é sempre o último a saber, and Maria Teresa Horta’s As luzes de Leonor.

Several biographies were also published in 2011, notably two volumes on Portuguese writers—the magisterial António Mega Ferreira’s portrait of José Agostinho de Macedo, Macedo: uma biografia da infâmia, and João Pedro George’s Puta que os pariu!: a biografia de Luiz Pacheco. In the realm of poetry, acclaimed author Ana Luísa Amaral published a new collection entitled Vozes, and Margarida Vale de Gato’s Mulher ao mar (2010) was praised as the best first collection by a female poet in a few decades.

Brazil

Brazilian publishers brought out several noteworthy books in 2011. One of these, Toupeira: a história do assalto ao Banco Central, by lawyer and former police investigator Roger Franchini, fictionalized the 2005 real-life bank heist of 170 million reais (about $100 million, 70% of which was never recovered) from the Banco Central de Fortaleza, Ceará. The author reviewed trial documents in order to create imaginary dialogues among the thieves. On a different note, writer and editor Nelson de Oliveira published Geração Zero Zero: fricções em rede, an anthology of short stories by 21 young writers who had garnered fame in the first decade of the 21st century and had published at least two books. Oliveira himself was awarded a Cuban Casa de las Américas prize for his 2010 novel Poeira: demônios e maldições, a work of science fiction set in a futuristic city. Antes das primeiras estórias collected for the first time some of the early short stories (1929–30) of João Guimarães Rosa.

In a version of cordel literature (“literature on a string”; the small printed folios of stories, often strung up on a string for sale and sung by their sellers, an art form that was initiated in the 20th century), Moreira de Acopiara’s Colcha de retalhos told the story of the Alvorada family, a tale that paralleled that of the author’s own life. The International Year of African Descent was launched in honour of Brazil’s most widely known and respected novelist, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.

Two notable Brazilian cultural figures, artist and activist Abdias do Nascimento and writer Moacyr Scliar, died in 2011. Among his many other activities, Nascimento in 1944 founded the Black Experimental Theatre in Rio de Janeiro to celebrate Afro-Brazilian culture and to train black actors. During the following 60 years, he became a preeminent defender and promoter of black culture in Brazil through his writings, paintings, and lectures both in Brazil and abroad. He also established Ipeafro, the Rio-based Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, which remained a vital centre. Also an outsider of sorts, Scliar wrote novels and short fiction that examined through allegories and from a Jewish perspective the questions of Brazilian identity. His book O centauro no jardim (1980; The Centaur in the Garden, 1984), for example, was the tale of Guedali Tratskovsky, born a centaur to his immigrant Russian Jewish parents in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil. In this first work of fiction to confront Jewish immigration to Brazil, Scliar sought to reconcile intimate Jewish life (e.g., eating gefilte fish and observing Shabbat) with the realities of Brazilian street life (e.g., playing football [soccer] and dancing the samba).

Russian

In 2011 the competition continued between the highly consolidated large publishing houses, with an orientation toward mass-market fiction, and the smaller publishers, defenders of a more “elitist” conception of Russian literature. Uroki russkogo (“Russian Lessons”), an important series launched by KoLibri in 2010 with works by Anatoly Gavrilov, Vladislav Otroshchenko, and Oleg Zobern, ceased publication in 2011 owing to losses. Before doing so, however, it managed to release books by Nikolay Baytov and others. Perhaps the most significant publication in the series was Denis Osokin’s Ovsyanki (“Yellowhammers” [a type of bird]), a story collection and his second published book. Osokin was generally regarded as one of the most talented discoveries of the 21st century and was already well known because of the film adaptations that had been made of several of his stories, including Ovsyanki (2010). Osokin’s work was marked by an intense sensuality, a masterly style, and a subject matter that to many Russian readers was exotic: the contemporary survivors of the ancient Finno-Ugric and Turkic cultures of the Volga River (Osokin himself was a native of Kazan). Another noteworthy debut was produced by Ailuros, a small publishing house based in New York and directed by the poet Elena Suntsova; Ushi ot mertvogo Andryushi (“Dead Andryusha’s Ears”), written by the St. Petersburg author (and artist) Irina Glebova, was a remarkable revival of the novella form that was associated with Leningrad in the 1960s and ’70s. Finally, another debut, or in this case a pseudodebut, ought not to pass without comment: the publication by Limbus Press of two novels by the pseudonymous Figl-Migl: Shchaste (2010; “Happiness”) and Ty tak lyubish eti filmy (“You So Love These Films”). Although Limbus touted those works as the first of Figl-Migl’s to be published, three other novels had been published under that name in St. Petersburg journals since 1999. The latest of Figl-Migl’s works, Ty tak lyubish eti filmy, which played with several popular genres (including the detective novel and the urban fantasy), had been judged by some critics as less successful than the earlier works. It nevertheless came in second to Dmitry Bykov’s Ostromov; ili, uchenik charodeya (2010; “Ostromov; or, The Wizard’s Pupil”), about occultists in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, for the 2011 National Bestseller Prize.

Russian author Zakhar Prilepin took the National Bestseller Prize for his novel Grekh (2007; “Sin”).Igor Kubedinov—Itar-Tass/LandovBoth the National Bestseller and the Russian Booker committees decided in 2011 to award a prize for the best work of the previous 10 years. The National Bestseller awarded its prize to Zakhar Prilepin for his 2007 Grekh (“Sin”). Prilepin’s work, intensely emotional and politically radical (he was a member of the outlawed National Bolshevik Party, although this did not prevent him from participating in Kremlin receptions for leading cultural figures), had long been the object of critical controversy; some saw his work as an eloquent expression of the times, whereas others saw it as aesthetically primitive. The 2011 Russian Booker was awarded only for the achievement of the decade. Initially there was strong support for Ruben David Gonsales Gallego, whose Beloe na chernom (2002; White on Black, 2006) had won the Russian Booker in 2003. In his book Gallego, a Russian of Spanish and Venezuelan extraction, described his experiences of having been disabled from birth and orphaned early in childhood. In 2011 he was critically injured in an accident in Washington, D.C. (where he lived). That circumstance provoked a flurry of letters calling for him to be awarded the Russian Booker of the Decade. When he regained consciousness, however, Gallego requested instead that he be put on the panel that determined the winner. The short list included Oleg Pavlov’s 2002 Booker winner Karagandinskiye devyatiny; ili, povest poslednikh dney (“Karaganda Commemorations; or, A Tale of the Last Days”), Zakhar Prilepin’s 2006 finalist Sankya, Roman Senchin’s 2009 finalist Yeltyshevy (“The Yeltyshevs”), Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s 2007 finalist Daniel Shtayn, perevodchik (Daniel Stein, Interpreter, 2011), and Aleksandr Chudakov’s 2001 finalist Lozhitsya mgla na staryye stupeni (A Gloom Is Cast upon the Ancient Steps, 2004– ). Chudakov was the winner.

The 2010 Andrey Bely Prize in poetry was awarded to Sergey Stratanovsky, a leading poet of the Leningrad underground of the 1970s and ’80s; to Anatoly Gavrilov for his minimalist prose; to the literary scholar Lyudmila Zubova for her studies of the language of contemporary Russian poetry; to Aleksey Prokopiev, a gifted translator of German Expressionist works; and to the directors of two publishing houses: Yevgeny Kolchuzhin of Vodoley and Sergey Kudryavtsev of Giley, whose houses published the collected works of two very talented deceased contemporary poets, Sergey Petrov (Vodoley) and Gennady Aygi (Giley).

The Russian Prize, given to Russian-language writers living abroad, was awarded in 2011 to, among others, the 75-year-old poet and human rights activist Natalya Gorbanevskaya. That award and her recent books bore witness to a burst of creative energy not usually associated with poets of advanced age. The Debut Prize for young writers underwent a change of rules in 2011 that extended the age limit from 25 to 35. As a result, the nominees included many mature and well-established writers.

Among new books of poetry for 2011 was a posthumous title from Elena Shvarts, Pereletnaya ptitsa (“The Migratory Bird”). Significant new works of poetry came from Oleg Yuryev, who lived in Frankfurt am Main, Ger.; Aleksandr Belyakov from Yaroslavl; Aleksey Porvin from St. Petersburg; Yekaterina Simonova from the Ural city of Nizhny Tagil; Polina Barskova, who taught at Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.; Marianna Geyde, who lived in Moscow; Andrey Polyakov from the Crimea; and Ilya Rissenberg of Kharkiv, Ukr. The geographic diversity of the Russian muse was a fundamental sign of the times. Another such sign was the gradual loss of standing of the old-guard “thick journals” and their replacement by Web-based publications.

Persian

In Iran old tensions between the state censorship apparatus, private publishing enterprises, and the reading public escalated in 2011, with the result that while fewer new titles appeared on the market, more copies of previously published literary works were issued, read, and reviewed. Meanwhile, state production of literature and sponsorship of academic literary studies, particularly in relatively safe areas such as children’s literature, took new strides. Shiraz University, which in recent years had emerged as a prominent centre for the study of children’s literature, in May hosted a conference on the subject and in April and September published two more issues of the Journal of Iranian Children’s Literature Studies, launched in 2010.

The perennial tug of war between the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and Iran’s publishers reached new heights in August when a brawl over a few lines in a classic epic poem resulted in baseless reports, fanned by the intellectual opposition both in Iran and abroad, that Persian classics were now fair game for the censors of the Islamic Republic.

Muṣṭafā Mastur’s Tehrān dar baʿd az ẓuhr (“Tehran in the Afternoon”), a collection of six short stories revolving around women, love, and prostitution first published in late 2010, became the latest sensation in prose fiction, going through a dozen editions in less than a year. Maziar Ouliaeinia’s Hindisah-yi jahān-i darun (“The Geometry of the World Within”), also published in 2010 in Esfahan, became one of the most popular poetry collections of the year. Meanwhile, among the works published in 2011, the urge to revisit the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s found contemporary expression in Kāmrān Muḥammadī’s novel, Ān jā kih barfhā āb namīshavand (“Where Snows Will Not Melt”), conceived as the first volume of a trilogy. Muḥammadī’s book attracted much attention on the part of a public eager to develop new perspectives on that war.

Veteran novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s latest major work, “Zaval-i sarhang,” which in Iran was placed on the list of “unpublishable books,” first appeared in German as Der Colonel (2009; The Colonel, 2011). It was one of 12 novels long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. On a more sombre note, the death in March of internationally recognized textual scholar Iraj Afshar in Tehran was the first of several literary losses in 2011.

Arabic

The events of the Arab Spring—which had its roots in Tunisia, where protests began in December 2010, and subsequently spread throughout the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa—were central to the literature of the Arab world in 2011. Oral poetry was the literary form that most speedily addressed those events; much of it was spontaneously composed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which was the centre of the uprising in Egypt. The most prominent poem in colloquial Arabic (al-ʿammiyyah) was ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Abnūdī’s “Lissa al-nizām mā saqatch/saʾatch” (“The System Has Not Fallen Yet”), in which he denounced the abuses of the regime of Hosni Mubarak—who stepped down from the presidency of Egypt in February 2011—and welcomed the young revolution. The Egyptian Fārūq Juwaydah attacked all oppressive leaders in his poem “Ilā kull jallad taghā” (“To Every Tyrannical Executioner”) and praised the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring. The events in Tunisia that came to be known as the Jasmine Revolution prompted Tunisian poet Tahar Bakri to change the title of his most-recent collection of verse from Chants pour la Tunisie to Je te nomme Tunisie. His poems are filled with a nostalgic love for his country of origin and with references to the bloody events of the revolution.

Other works that engaged with the uprising in Egypt included Li-kull arḍ mīlād: ayyām al-Taḥrīr (“Every Land Has a Birth: The Days of Tahrir”), in which the novelist Ibrāhīm ʿAbd al-Majīd recorded his personal experiences among the demonstrators. In his novel Ajniḥat al-farāshah (“The Wings of the Butterfly”), Egyptian writer Muḥammad Salmāwī denounced the political corruption in Egypt that contributed to the anger underlying the uprising. Egyptian writer Ḥasan Nūr’s short story “Burkān” (“Volcano”) depicted the deteriorating conditions in his society: the inefficient public transportation, high food prices, and unemployment. Sudanese author Amīr Tāj al-Sirr alluded in his novel Taʿāṭuf (“Sympathy”) to the divisions and conflicts in Sudan that culminated, ultimately, in the emergence of an independent South Sudan in 2011. He also touched on the changing conditions in Libya and on Libyans’ efforts to free themselves from the dictates of The Green Book, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s description of a form of Islamic socialism that he had imposed on the country. (Libyans would eventually become free in October 2011 after the uprising in Libya culminated in Qaddafi’s death at the hands of rebel forces.)

Multifaceted Moroccan French writer Tahar Ben Jelloun managed to respond quickly to the events of the Arab Spring, constructing his short novel Par le feu around his imagining of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi’s family life and the circumstances that led to Bouazizi’s self-immolation, which resulted in the Jasmine Revolution. Ben Jelloun also analyzed the Arab Spring in his long essay L’Étincelle.

Elsewhere, writers used their books to defend the causes that had become their raison d’être. In Ḥubbī al-awwal (“My First Love”), a novel released at the end of 2010 that centres on the armed struggle of the Palestinians and the role of Palestinian Liberation Organization official Fayṣal ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Ḥusaynī within it, Saḥar Khalīfah continued to tell the life story of the narrator of her previous novel Aṣl wa faṣl (2009; “Of Noble Origin”). Writing from Haifa, Israel, Salmān Nāṭūr offered in his novel Hiya, anā wa-al-kharīf (“She, Me, and the Autumn”) a symbolic account of what he depicted as the slow usurpation of Palestinian heritage in Israel. Francophone Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra set the action of his novel L’Équation africaine in Africa, specifically in Somalia and Darfur, in an effort to understand the psychology of Somali pirates and their brutal acts. The pirates’ poverty, deep personal suffering, and lingering anticolonial sentiment are central to Khadra’s portrait. In Al-Jalīd (“Ice”), Egyptian author Ṣunʿ Allāh Ibrāhīm traveled back in time to 1973 and recorded the life of a graduate student in the Soviet Union. His novel had a bold narrative style that resembles a personal journal while using techniques associated with documentary filmmaking.

Dec. 11, 2011, was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Plans to commemorate the event were reduced to a modest size because of political conditions, but the Egyptian press and numerous cultural organizations still celebrated the life and works of Mahfouz, who died in 2006.

Moroccan novelist Muḥammad Ashʿarī was one of two recipients of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction—the so-called Arabic Booker—with Al-Qaws wa al-farāshah (2010; “The Arch and the Butterfly”). It touches on various domestic political issues, but at its centre is the reaction of its protagonist, Youssef, to his only son’s involvement with the Taliban, which led to his death in Afghanistan. The other recipient, Rajāʾ ʿĀlim of Saudi Arabia, became the first woman to win the prize, for her novel Ṭawq al-ḥamām (2010; “The Dove’s Necklace”), which revolves around a crime committed in Mecca.

The Arab Spring made some intellectuals look to peripheral regions in their countries. Nubian literature drew interest in Egypt, thanks to the efforts of that country’s High Council for Culture as well as the Nubian Charitable Association, Qurta. The council also turned its attention to the literary activities in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Moreover, Egyptian intellectuals were eager to regain their leadership position in the Arab world. Journalist Kārim Yaḥyā cited as evidence of the country’s secondary role the disappearance of many Egyptian journals and the large readership of Arab journals such as the Kuwaiti Al-ʿArabī (founded 1958) and the Qatari Al-Dawḥah (founded 1976). Yaḥyā attributed the decline of Egypt’s journals to political manipulation and the absence of financial independence.

Few writers were as openly critical of their political leaders prior to the Arab Spring as was ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī, an Egyptian writer. His wholehearted support for the protests came as no surprise to anyone, and he continued his attacks on corruption, hypocrisy, and political manipulation. The Arab Spring forced other Arab intellectuals to review their position vis-à-vis dictatorial regimes and fallen leaders they had supported or tolerated. Libyan writer Aḥmad Ibrāhīm Faqīh, for example, defended his connection to Qaddafi and justified having written a flattering introduction included in a book of Qaddafi’s writings as a response to feeling that his life had been seriously under threat. Those intellectuals who had not raised their voices against the abuses of dictatorial regimes and had enjoyed personal favours kept a low profile, and some incurred the wrath of their patriotic colleagues.

In Kuwait the shaky literary scene was somewhat stirred by the Arab Spring, though the regime maintained its control over the country. Kuwaiti critic and writer Fahd Tawfīq al-Hindāl blamed the weakness of cultural activities in his country on the lack of support from the country’s cultural institutions, the subjugation of culture to politics, and a pervasive consumerism. There were similar concerns among Jordanian intellectuals, who called for governmental transparency, freedom, and the end of the status quo. Although neither Kuwait nor Jordan saw the violent protests that other countries did, the engagement of their writers with the concerns of the Arab Spring demonstrated the strong sense of community generated among Arabs. They increased their pan-Arab meetings and set plans for sustained cooperation in the future.

Prominent among the writers who died in 2011 were Khayrī Shalabī of Egypt and ʿAbd Allāh Rakībī of Algeria.

Chinese

The most eye-catching event in Chinese literature in 2011 was the awarding of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, which was founded in 1982 and was the most important national prize for fiction written in Chinese. The prize had been bestowed only seven times previously. In 2011 it was shared by five writers: Zhang Wei, Liu Xinglong, Bi Feiyu, Mo Yan, and Liu Zhenyun.

Zhang’s novel Ni zai gaoyuan (“You on the Plateau”), as published in 2010, ran to 10 volumes and consisted of 4.5 million Chinese characters, which placed it among the longest contemporary novels in the world. Zhang first began publishing the material that became Ni zai gaoyuan in the 1990s. Zhang’s novel sharply criticizes the modernization that deeply changed rural China over the past century. It presents a sadly lyrical description of the village life that the Chinese people have lost.

Liu Xinglong received a share of the Mao Dun Prize for Tian xingzhe (2009; “Skywalker”), a novel that describes the hard life of the young teacher Zhang Yingcai and his colleagues, who struggle to educate the children of their village while they suffer from poor material conditions—such as a lack of classrooms, nonexistent books, and low wages—as well as the corruption of local officials. Among the novelists born in the 1960s, Bi was probably the most popular in mainland China. The novel for which he received the prize, Tuina (2008; “Massage”), details the darkness as well as the brightness in the inner world of several blind massage therapists who tenaciously seek dignity and love in the midst of their often-painful lives.

Mo and Liu Zhenyun were recognized for their novels Wa (2009; “Frog”) and Yi ju ding yiwan ju (2009; “One Sentence Worth Ten Thousand”), respectively. Both books were unique in style. Wa tells bitter stories about the one-child policy and other family-planning programs undertaken by the Chinese government since the 1960s, and Yi ju ding yiwan ju considers the subject of a uniquely Chinese form of loneliness and friendship.

Winners of the Mao Dun Prize received exposure to an audience beyond China by way of a new English-language version of Renmin wenxue (“People’s Literature”), the first periodical founded in the People’s Republic, in which selections from fiction and nonfiction were published. The release in late 2011 of the first volume of the new magazine, called Pathlight: New Chinese Writing and overseen by the editor in chief of Renmin wenxue, marked a significant effort by one of China’s most prestigious publications to raise worldwide awareness of contemporary Chinese writing.

Artist and writer Mu Xin, who had lived for more than two decades in the U.S., died in his place of birth, Wuzhen, in 2011. He was born Sun Pu in 1927 and grew up in a wealthy family that provided him a classical Chinese education; he also had early exposure to Western literature. He was a prolific writer and painter, but his works were destroyed in 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution. He was subsequently jailed and held under house arrest multiple times, and he left China in 1982. During his time in the U.S., Mu Xin published a wide range of poetry and prose in Chinese that found a small but devoted audience. He returned to China in 2006. His stories were collected in English translation for the first time in An Empty Room (2011).

Japanese

Though the Great Tohoku Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and its aftermath were not depicted in any of the year’s major literary works in Japanese, the disaster made clear the power of the printed word in the aftermath of calamity. In spite of another year in which the Japanese publishing industry as a whole contracted, sales of printed publications increased at many bookstores in the region most affected by the earthquake, where people were seeking books that provided both spiritual and practical remedies.

The committee responsible for awarding the Akutagawa Prize, presented twice a year for the best work of fiction by a promising Japanese writer, declined in July to select the year’s first winner. Amy Yamada, one of the judges, commented that the committee had tried hard to select a winner but found none deserving of the prize. Some thought that the judges might have set a particularly—and unachievably—high standard in the hopes of supplying a piece of good news via the announcement of a new writer amid the gloom of the disaster.

Setsuko Tsumura, who won the year’s Yasunari Kawabata Prize with her short story “Ikyō” (“A Foreign Land,” which appeared in the January issue of the literary magazine Bungakukai), responded directly to the earthquake; she donated the royalties from sales of a work by her deceased husband, Akira Yoshimura, to relief efforts. Yoshimura’s book on historical tsunamis, originally published in 1970 and subsequently reissued as Sanriku kaigan ōtsunami (“The Sanriku Coast Giant Tsunamis”), was widely reread in 2011 after the events of March 11.

Japanese writer Mariko Asabuki received an Akutagawa Prize for her novel Kikotowa, which explored the memories and dreams of two women reunited after 25 years.Kyodo/LandovIn January the second Akutagawa Prize of 2010 was announced. It went to two contrasting works: Kikotowa, a story by Mariko Asabuki about the reunion of two women, Kiko and Towako, which was first published in the September 2010 issue of Shinchō, and Kenta Nishimura’s story about a miserable day labourer, Kueki ressha (“Labour Train”), which first appeared in the December 2010 issue of Shinchō.

Among the remarkable literary works of 2011 were another book by Tsumura, Kōbai (“Red Blossomed Plum Tree”), about her last days with Yoshimura; Teru Miyamoto’s family chronicle Jiu no oto (“The Sound of a Blessed Rain”); and two collections of essays by Haruki Murakami, Zatsubunshū (“Miscellaneous Writings”) and Ōkina kabu muzukashii abokado (“A Big Turnip, a Difficult Avocado”).

Tokuya Higashigawa won the Booksellers Award, an annual prize designating the best book as selected by sales clerks of Japanese bookstores, for his Nazotoki wa dinā no ato de (2010; “Let’s Solve a Riddle After the Dinner”). Natsuo Kirino’s Nanika aru (2010; “There Is Something”) received the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. The Kenzaburō Ōe Prize was awarded to Tomoyuki Hoshino’s Ore ore (2010; “It’s Me, It’s Me”), and Mayumi Inaba received the Tanizaki Prize for Hantō e (“To the Peninsula”).

Deaths in 2011 included science-fiction author Sakyo Komatsu, in July, and essayist, novelist, and psychiatrist Morio Kita (pen name of Sokichi Saitō), in October. Some of Komatsu’s final writings appeared in San ichiichi no mirai (“For the Future After March 11”). Kita, a winner of the Akutagawa Prize, was famous for his humorous Dokutoru Manbō (“Doctor Sunfish”) series.

Awarded since 1901; included at the behest of Alfred Nobel, who specified a prize for those who "shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." The prizewinners are selected in October by the Swedish Academy and receive the award on December 10 in Stockholm. Prize: a gold medal and a monetary award that varies from year to year; in 2011 the award was SEK 10 million.

Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden)

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

First awarded in 1996; this is the largest international literary prize and is open to books written in any language. The award is a joint initiative of Dublin City Council, the Municipal Government of Dublin City, and the productivity-improvement company IMPAC. It is administered by Dublin City Public Libraries. Prize:€100,000, of which 25% goes to the translator if the book was not written in English, and a Waterford crystal trophy. The awards are given at Dublin Castle in May or June.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (U.S.)

Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Established in 1969 and awarded biennially by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today. Novelists, poets, and dramatists are equally eligible. Prize: $50,000, a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver, and a certificate.

Duo Duo (China), awarded in 2010

Man Booker International Prize

This prize is awarded every other year (beginning in 2005) to a living author of fiction of any nationality who writes in English or whose work is widely translated into English for the body of his work. The prize is supported by the Man Group PLC. Winners are announced in midyear. Prize: £60,000.

Philip Roth (U.S.)

Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature

This award, first bestowed in 2003 by the government of Sweden, is given annually to one or more living authors who, in the words of the organizers, "in their writing have produced literature for children and young people of absolutely the highest artistic quality and in the humanistic spirit associated with Astrid Lindgren." Organizations that contribute to the literary welfare of children and young people are also eligible. Prize: SEK 5 million.

Shaun Tan (Australia)

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize

Established in 1987 by the Commonwealth Foundation. In 2011 there was one award of £10,000 for the best book submitted, as well as an award of £5,000 for the best first book. In each of the four regions of the Commonwealth, two prizes of £1,000 are awarded: one for the best book and one for the best first book.

Best Book

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone)

Best First Book

A Man Melting by Craig Cliff (New Zealand)

Regional winners—Best Book

Africa

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone)

Caribbean & Canada

Room by Emma Donoghue (Canada)

Europe & South Asia

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (U.K.)

Southeast Asia & Pacific

That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott (Australia)

Man Booker Prize

Established in 1969, sponsored by Booker McConnell Ltd. and, beginning in 2002, the Man Group; administered by Booktrust in the U.K. Awarded to the best full-length novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published in the U.K. during the 12 months ended September 30. Prize: £50,000.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Costa Book of the Year

Established in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards (from 1985 Whitbread Book of the Year); Costa Coffee assumed sponsorship in 2006. The winners of the Costa Book Awards for Poetry, Biography, Novel, and First Novel as well as the Costa Children’s Book of the Year each receive £5,000, and the winner of the Costa Book of the Year prize receives an additional £30,000. Winners are announced early in the year following the award.

Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott (2010 award)

Orange Prize for Fiction

Established in 1996. Awarded to a work of published fiction written by a woman in English and published in the U.K. during the 12 months ended March 31. Prize: £30,000 and a bronze figurine called the "Bessie."

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (U.S.)

Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award

The prize was first awarded in 2005 and recognizes a collection of short stories in English by a living author and published in the previous 12 months. The award is organized by the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ire., and is underwritten by the Cork City Council in association with the Irish Times. Prize:€35,000, shared by the writer and the translators (if any).

Saints and Sinners by Edna O’Brien (Ireland)

Bollingen Prize in Poetry

Established in 1948 by Paul Mellon. It is awarded to an American poet every two years by the Yale University Library. Prize: $100,000.

Susan Howe (2011 prize)

PEN/Faulkner Award

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation each year recognizes the best published works of fiction by contemporary American writers. The award, named for William Faulkner, was founded by writers in 1980 to honour their peers. Prize: $15,000.

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg

Pulitzer Prizes in Letters and Drama

Begun in 1917. Awarded by Columbia University, New York City, on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board for books published in the previous year. Five categories in Letters are honoured: Fiction, Biography, and General Nonfiction (authors of works in these categories must be American citizens); History (the subject must be American history); and Poetry (for original verse by an American author). The Drama prize is for "a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life." Prize: $10,000 for each award.

Fiction

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Drama

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris

History

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner

Poetry

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

Biography

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

General Nonfiction

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

National Book Awards

Awarded since 1950 by the National Book Foundation, a consortium of American publishing groups. Categories have varied, beginning with 3—Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry—swelling to 22 in 1983, and returning to the following 4 in 1996. Prize: $10,000 and a bronze sculpture in each category.

Fiction

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Nonfiction

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Poetry

Head Off & Split by Nikky Finney

Young People’s Literature

Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai

Frost Medal

Awarded annually since 1930 by the Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry.

Charles Simic

Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) Awards

The ALSC, a branch of the American Library Association (ALA), presents a series of awards each year for excellence in children’s literature. The two best-established and best-known are the following:

The Newbery Medal, first bestowed in 1922 (the oldest award in the world for children’s literature), honours the author of the most distinguished contribution in English to American literature for children. The award consists of a bronze medal.

Clare Vanderpool, for Moon over Manifest

The Caldecott Medal, first bestowed in 1938, is awarded to the artist of the most distinguished picture book for children. The award consists of a bronze medal.

Erin E. Stead, for A Sick Day for Amos McGee (written by Philip C. Stead)

Governor General’s Literary Awards

Canada’s premier literary awards. Prizes are given in 14 categories altogether: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Translation, Nonfiction, and Children’s Literature (Text and Illustration), each in English and French. Established in 1937. Prize: Can$25,000.

Fiction (English)

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Fiction (French)

L’Homme blanc by Perrine Leblanc

Poetry (English)

Killdeer by Phil Hall

Poetry (French)

Plus haut que les flammes by Louise Dupré

Griffin Poetry Prize

Established in 2000 and administered by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. The award honours first-edition books of poetry published during the preceding year. Prize: Can$65,000.

Canadian Award

Ossuaries by Dionne Brand

International Award

Heavenly Questions by Gjertrud Schnackenberg (U.S.)

Büchner Prize

Georg-Büchner-Preis. Awarded for a body of literary work in the German language. First awarded in 1923; now administered by the German Academy for Language and Literature. Prize:€50,000.

Friedrich Christian Delius (Germany)

P.C. Hooft Prize

P.C. Hooft-prijs. The Dutch national prize for literature, established in 1947. Prize:€60,000.

H.J.A. Hofland

Nordic Council Literature Prize

Established in 1961. Selections are made by a 10-member jury from among original works first published in Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish during the previous two years or in other Nordic languages (Finnish, Faroese, Sami, etc.) during the previous four years. Prize: DKK 350,000.

Milli trjánna by Gyrðir Elíasson (Iceland)

Prix Goncourt

Prix de l’Académie Goncourt. First awarded in 1903 from the estate of French literary figure Edmond Goncourt, to memorialize him and his brother, Jules. Prize:€10.

L’Art français de la guerre by Alexis Jenni

Prix Femina

Established in 1904. The awards for works "of imagination" are announced by an all-female jury in the categories of French fiction, fiction in translation, and nonfiction. Announced in November together with the Prix Médicis. Prize: not stated.

French FictionJayne Mansfield 1967 by Simon Liberati

Strega Prize

Premio Strega. Awarded annually since 1947 for the best work of prose (fiction or nonfiction) by an Italian author in the previous year. The prize is supported by the beverage company Liquore Strega and Telecom Italia. Prize: not stated.

Storia della mia gente by Edoardo Nesi

Cervantes Prize for Hispanic Literature

Premio Cervantes. Established in 1975 and awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture for a body of work in the Spanish language. Announced in November or December and awarded the following April. Prize:€125,000.

Nicanor Parra (Chile)

Planeta Prize

Premio Planeta de Novela. Established in 1952 by the Planeta Publishing House for the best original novel in Spanish. Awarded in Barcelona in October. Prize:€601,000.

El imperio eres tú by Javier Moro

Camões Prize

Prémio Camões. Established in 1988 by the governments of Portugal and Brazil to honour a "representative" author writing in the Portuguese language. Prize:€100,000.

Manuel António Pina (Portugal)

Russian Booker Prize

Awarded since 1992; the Russian Booker Prize has sometimes carried the names of various sponsors—e.g., Smirnoff in 1997–2001. In 2004 it was underwritten by the Open Russia Charitable Organization and called the Booker/Open Russia Literary Prize. Awards: $20,000 for the winner, $2,000 for each finalist. In 2011 the award was for the Book of the Decade.

Premiya Bolshaya Kniga. First given out in 2006; it is sponsored by the government of Russia and underwritten by a number of prominent businessmen, who also serve as the jury. Awards: 3 million rubles for first prize, 1.5 million for second, and 1 million for third.

Mikhail Shishkin for his novel Pismovnik ("A Compilation of Letters")

Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature

Established in 1996 and awarded for the best contemporary novel published in Arabic. Prize: $1,000 and a silver medal. The winning work is translated into English and published in Cairo, London, and New York. The award in 2011 was symbolic.

The revolutionary creativity of the Egyptian people during the popular uprising that began on 25 January 2011

Caine Prize for African Writing

The Caine Prize for African Writing is awarded annually for a short story written by an African writer and published in English. The prize is named for Sir Michael Caine, longtime chairman of Booker PLC, the publishing company, and chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for 25 years. The Caine Prize was first given out in 2000. Award: £10,000 plus a travel allowance.

NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) for "Hitting Budapest"

Man Asian Literary Prize

This prize, inaugurated in 2007, is awarded annually for an Asian novel written in English or translated into English. In 2010 it was announced that, as part of a new format, the previous year’s winner would be announced in spring. The prize is underwritten by the Man Group PLC. Prize: $30,000 for the author and $5,000 for the translator.

Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu (China) (2010 award)

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki Prize

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Shō. Established in 1965 to honour the memory of novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Awarded annually (except in 2009) to a Japanese author for an exemplary literary work. Prize: ¥1,000,000 and a trophy.

Mayumi Inaba for Hantō e ("To the Peninsula")

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Prize

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke Shō. Established in 1935 and now sponsored by the Association for the Promotion of Japanese Literature; the prize is awarded in January and June for the best serious work of fiction by a promising new Japanese writer published in a magazine or journal. Prize: ¥1,000,000 and a commemorative gift.

Established in 1982 to honour contemporary Chinese novels and named after novelist Shen Yanbing (1896–1981), whose nom de plume was Mao Dun; awarded roughly every three years. The latest awards were given on Aug. 20, 2011.